Keeping Your Cash: Avoiding Senseless Online Shopping

It’s easy to shop these days.

Stores are open longer – I remember when Thursday night trading started, oooh way back in the 1980s. What a revolution in shopping that was considered to be! All those working mothers who could shop after 5pm – what an innovation!

And nowadays, some stores are open 24 hours, making it possible to shop at 2am if you want to.

But even if your store of choice isn’t open around the clock, there’s always the internet.

At your fingertips is a world of commerce – all you need is a computer and an internet connection, and an urge to splurge, and you can be shopping all day and all night if you choose to.

With the added feature of not needing to leave your home, you can literally be shopping naked, or with only a smile or a grimace on your face, if that’s your preference.

For sure, online shopping has made life easier for quite a few folks. Not only for the agoraphobic, but for those who don’t have time to drive to the mall, find a park within an hour’s walk of the mall, orient themselves to a point of entry, navigate around the other shoppers, locate the required store and then desired item/s within it, make the purchase, then do it all in reverse to get outa there and back to the relative calm of their home environment.

Phew!

If you dislike shopping, are very time poor, or are logistically challenged in some way, then all of that is one big headache that online shopping obliterates.

If your penchant is for shopping online, it can be easy to rack up those purchases without fully realising the extent of your haul. After the buzz of the box arriving diminishes (which may only take seconds), you may find yourself experiencing a range of emotions from regret, worry and embarrassment, all related to online purchases of items you didn’t need, ultimately didn’t want, and won’t use (or not to their full extent).

Keep your cash! Stay sane when your fingers are on the keyboard and your modem is switched on.

Use these top tips to keep your cash and avoid senseless online shopping:

Unsubscribe from online shopping ezines, blogs and alerts that notify you when there’s a sale or new items are just released for sale. Yes, this may seem drastic but if your intention is to make mindful choices about what you want, when you want them, then you don’t need information literally coming at you, exhorting, persuading or in any way encouraging you to buy. When you receive information about a sale or new items to purchase, the energy is flowing from them to you – you are the passive recipient of this data. This is hardly the empowering position of choosing for yourself what you want, when you want it. Plus let’s be real: those alerts have one purpose and one purpose only: to provoke you into buying something, whether it’s something you want, need, or will ever use. Take your power back. Unsubscribe.

Don’t drift into the habit of “just looking” at online shopping sites. If you are prone to impulsive purchasing, which many of us are, then it’s all too easy to forget your bank balance, forget what you really want and need, forget your bigger financial and life goals, and click on the Buy Now button. It’s true that we don’t miss what we never see. If you never clap eyes those purple leather driving gloves, you won’t miss them. If you never eye spy that slinky silk shirt at 25% off, you can’t pine after it. But if you’re there, “just looking”, then you can lose your head for enough time to make the purchase. Don’t set yourself up to fail like that. Don’t spend mindless time on those sites in the first place, wasting your time “just looking”.

If you are shopping online for something you’ve made the mindful decision to purchase because it’s a clear need, a definite want, and something you know you’ll use or wear, then click off as soon as you’ve made the purchase. Don’t keep browsing around (that Keep Shopping button has a lot to answer for!). Make your purchase, then log out or click away. That way, you’ll feel great about your purchase, long after the delivery person has driven away and you’ve opened up your package.